


Magic Tricks

by oonaseckar



Series: torn between two lovers, feelin' like a fool [1]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Infidelity, M/M, Second Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 06:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2642348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles has been up to no good with Erik, given the chance, and now he's left his Dear John and hit the road for the West Coast.  Everybody's powers come in handy, especially Az's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic Tricks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fishwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fishwrites/gifts).



To be fair, Charles does realise that he probably made a mistake, running off across the country to Berkeley with Erik for the new academic year, the new semester, a new romance. Leaving a note stuck to the fridge door back in Cambridge, leaving Az.

He just wishes he hadn't waited to realise it until they were stuck, broke down on the side of the road, with Erik crooning and fondling at his vintage Corvette like it's his girlfriend, having a sulk because he ain't been treating her right.

Meanwhile his new boyfriend – and Charles would just say his old friend, except the two statuses seem to cancel one another out in Erik's mind, far as he can tell – is having a quiet breakdown of his own up on the grass verge, trying to get reception on his phone, trying to reach out with his mind. Trying to decide whether to go on or go back. Whether going back is an option, or if Az will already have read that note, and washed his hands, thanking heaven fasting.

He's mucked Az about a fair bit, it's true. Wouldn't be at all surprising if he was just tired of it, glad to see the back of Charles.

And in the meantime, there's still both steam and smoke issuing from the hood of that fucking car, and Erik is still talking to it. “Come on baby. Don't do me this way. I know you can give a little more, you got a little more in you. You feel me, sweetheart?”

“For God's sake, Erik,” Charles says sharply. “You're going to be giving it cunnilingus in a minute. Mouth to mouth resus. You do realise it's a motor vehicle, not a woman?”

And Erik turns around – briefly – with a quick grin. And strokes a hand down the hood, like it's a lovely feminine flank. “What's the difference? Moody, temperamental, need a lot of lovin', expensive to maintain, absolutely worth it when they come through with the goods in the end.” He peers back into the bowels of the engine, and sighs heavily. “And turn you prematurely grey in the interim. Anya, baby, tell me you're not going to require a new radiator. I've spent more than my TA salary on you this year already, honey.”

Oh, of course Erik has named his car. That's when he's not being as lavish with the endearments and caresses as he's been sparing with them with Charles, for all that they've spent the last three days fucking like bunnies. Three days, in an apartment absent of Az, Charles at least trying desperately to make up for lost time, years spent in ridiculous pining. Not that any of it was planned. Not that he doesn't feel guilty enough to excoriate his soul, every time he thinks of waving Az off to his student conference at Michigan State, trustingly kissing Charles goodbye on the station platform. (No teleportation: too many colleagues and compadres to meet up with along the way. Ever the wily networker, Az.) Tickling his cheek with a playful tail, resting their foreheads together, telling Charles how much he'd miss him about eighteen times. Reminding him to pick up his doctoral interviews paperwork, to take his headache medication, not to starve in the lab when a project is just too fascinating. To take good care of his precious self.

(From quite manly and terse beginnings, they've managed to settle into a remarkable level of mush, sentiment and babytalk, in the past nine months or so. It would be embarrassing, but, you know, fuck it. Anyone without a decent level of sentiment doesn't know what they're missing. Except now, he'd better learn to do without it. He doubts babytalk is a specialty of Erik's, somehow. Except maybe to his fucking car.)

Christ, Charles thinks. He's such an asshole. He could ameliorate and mitigate it and come up with any excuse he likes, but... it is what it is.

He checks his phone again. No, no fucking reception in this back-roads backwater, along Erik's planned route that would 'have scenic advantages'. (For that, read opportune stop-off points for blow-jobs and naps, Charles reckons). And Erik still leaning over the car murmuring seductive motor-vehicular dirty-talk, maybe quoting sonnets to its carburettor, casting love runes. Erik: skilled mechanic, trained engineer, future saviour of American industry. Oh, yeah, and _metallokinetic_. What the fuck?

“Erik,” he says, sharper than ever, sharper than is wise with his dear old friend, and he should know better. Has always been more careful than this, more placatory, more anxious to please. But, now, fuck it. “How about you explain to me again why you can't use your powers and just – “

He stops, and puts a hand to his brow, inhales and exhales like a yogic master. Calm. _Calm_. Don't spontaneously combust, he thinks. It's not as if Erik will be able to fix you. It's not as if Erik will _notice_. “Erik, you control metal. Can't you just _make_ it go, keep it going to get us there and then get it repaired?”

Christ, the look that gets him. Erik is at least noticing him now, but not in any friendly way. “How about you explain to _me_ again, Charles, how come a certified fucking genius has still never mastered the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine? The oil-leak's left the engine unlubricated. The radiator's got a hole ripped in it. I can't levitate the car the whole way - even if my powers were up to it, the cops aren't going to like it. If I force the engine parts to keep going anyway at this point, the cost of getting the damage fixed by the time we get to Berkeley will break the fucking bank. We're not _all_ trust fund kids, Charles.”

No, no endearments to spare for Charles, clearly. All used up on fucking Anya. Keeping his calm and reasonable tone of voice going – in the face of Erik's hostility – isn't easy. But the thought that, in itself, it probably constitutes an annoyance, is some kind of secret salve. “The metallokinetic thing, though, Erik,” Charles says, sweet reason embodied. “You can fix the leaks, surely?”

People don't often glare at Charles like he's the most stupid, cretinaceous mouth-breather alive. He's not used to it. Az gazes at Charles like he's a miracle of nature, like... Well, all of that's gone for a Burton, obviously. Dumped in the trashcan as a failed experiment. “Have you seen the damage? There's a hole that would leave it too thin and fragile if I worked it thin enough to cover.The oil is gone, Charles. _Through the leak._ The radiator fluid is gone, ditto. The poor baby needs a trained mechanic and licensed parts. And water, and oil.”

“I have water,” Charles says reasonably, holding up his bottle of Lautresian French H2O. Erik turns away and puts his arm up over his face. Somewhat as if he's restraining himself from picking Charles up and shaking him. “What about the oil, anyway?” he asks. He can feel his own voice hardening. They're winding up to a proper row. This is uncharted territory, and his heart's rabbitting away, saying _fight or flight or fuck_ , saying _get out now_ , saying _what are you doing here anyway?_ The dismay is awful, awful. It wasn't supposed to go this way. Can they not survive one disagreement? They've been friends for twenty fucking years. Does three days of fucking just wipe that out?

Maybe Erik is thinking the same thing. Or at least thinking that Charles can't help it, if he's been too busy over the more abstruse details of nanoparticles and tiny robots, to ever bother to master the mundanities of basic car engine mechanics, remembering to keep his sodding palladium card paid off every month instead of running up overdue bills and whining to his fund directors, or how to work a vacuum cleaner. (Erik doesn't generally treat him as stupid, to be fair. More like he's a very brilliant, amusing toddler. To be set down in his stroller and pacified with candy, when the serious adults have serious adult conversation.) Charles watches his shoulders rise and fall, as he breathes a bit before he answers. “I only give my baby distilled water. And I didn't bring any, Charles. Very remiss of me, but I'd just had the car cleaned and valeted and in for the tires replaced, and I didn't exactly plan coming up to see you, this weekend. It was a spur of the moment thing. As you know.”

Yeah, too right it was, Charles muses. The only way he can excuse their current situation in his head, is to defend himself to himself, saying it wasn't, after all, _planned_. Not _planned._ Not that some part of his brain, some devious spot, didn't know full well – after Erik's last, and only, visit to Harvard – that letting it Freudianly slip on Facebook that Az would be out of town for a conference, would have certain results.

Those results amounting to an unscheduled cross-country trip, for Erik, and an unannounced arrival in town. To 'show Charles his new car', apparently. Charles wonders if that was just a euphemism from the beginning, or if Erik had kidded himself too.

If it was a euphemism, then it was a euphemism for 'turn up on the doorstep, invite yourself to stay, and watch Charles like a cat watching a mouse-hole for twelve hours or so. While Charles putters about nervously, tries to be oblivious, pretend he doesn't know what's going on. Volubly admires the car, since it's clearly expected. Drags Erik out for coffee, for a movie, for innocent activities, that only result in Erik getting closer and watching more intently.'

Then, hey presto, alakazam, Charles had got tired of the pretence too. Gone for a shower and not bothered coming back: just lain down on the bed coverlet, starkers still, and waited for Erik to come find him. The bed, his and Az's, because he might as well go for broke anyway. A fumble on the couch, a sweetly chaste kiss in the kitchen, a slippery slope and a pretence of unwitting, unintentional temptation, these things weren't going to mitigate against his guilt, or his betrayal. If he just accepted he was an unfaithful asshole then it'd be easier to get the job done.

Which it did: when Erik came looking, he'd got with the program immediately and dispensed with proprieties and pretence too. Leaving Charles rumpled up in swiftly disordered sheets twenty minutes later, with twenty years of friendship and a promising nine-month relationship turned upside down, staring at the ceiling and thinking it was really too late to ask himself if this was a good idea.

And Erik nuzzling in, looming over him, and asking 'What are you thinking?” God, and _that_ had been the most alarming moment. Twenty years, and this, he'd never known or realised about Erik?

It still seems to Charles, here and now, that his response of, “Please, tell me you're not one of those people who says that _every time_ ,” had been more than justified.

Still, it was Erik, and it's Erik now, and he loves Erik. Right? It's one of the eternal verities. The apple falls from the apple-tree, sky's blue, Charles Xavier loves Erik Lehnsherr. Some things you can rely on. Charles stares at his phone, back to Erik, and thinks about a mental prod at Az, a couple of hundred miles away. Just a little one, undetectable as he can make it. To see if he's read that note yet, if Charles' bridges are all burnt now. Not that he's going back. Not that he can go back, now. He's committed... isn't he? (Most of their friends, his and Az's, will think he _ought_ to be committed. Hank might try to get him committed. There's a general consensus that Az is the best thing that's ever happened to him, that Erik is a manipulative asshole, and maybe that's the point. Maybe he's here now, rebelling against that. Which would make him, what? About twelve?)

There's no earthly reason, for him to jump like a burnt cat, when strong arms slip about his waist, and a voice rumbles, “Guess who,” in his ear.

It's only that something about it is wrong. He's accustomed, now, to pretty much exactly that embrace, that protocol, that routine greeting. They're just usually accompanied, the arms, with a tail lashing and curling about his legs, snaking up to tickle his ear, disorder his hair. It's missing, and it's wrong that it's missing.

So that's how he knows, with Erik's arms around him, that he belongs with Az. It's awkward. “Look,” Erik says, smoothing back his hair and kissing his neck. (Just like Charles has fantasised a... well, he estimates maybe ten thousand times.) It's still good: it's not like it isn't sexy, for god's sake. He's not suddenly immune to Erik's charms, even while mad at him. He wants to go home, is all. Home is Az. “I'm going to walk to the nearest payphone and get a tow from a garage, okay? You stay here, wait till I get back, we'll stay the night in a motel. Don't worry. I'm not mad, don't be mad at me, baby.”

_Baby_ , Charles thinks. There was more passion and fire in every word out of Erik's mouth to the car, for God's sake. To _Anya._

Still, he takes one last kiss, because he figures it'll be the last one, and three days of Sodom and Gomorrah after twenty years of _abstinent pining buddies_ is not that much of a consummation. And Erik holds him back, hard, after, squints at him thoughtfully, and Charles figures there was something that gave him away, maybe the pressing up close to feel every inch, maybe the breathing heavy and nipping and just general all-around thoroughness like he didn't want to leave a millimetre of Erik's mouth unmapped for future explorers. The things that were not available to him for years, and now he's had a little bit, a taste.

He _still_ loves Erik, yep. It's really a pity that you can't have everything you want the way you want it, how you want it, when you want it. It's damned inconsiderate of the universe.

But Erik doesn't ask, so he doesn't volunteer anything. Just watches until Erik is almost out of sight, a tiny manikin tramping off in the distance with dogged determination, to save his fair Corvette from the indignity of hanging around like a cheap whore on the side of the road – and probably with some measure of concern for Charles, too, Charles will allow him that.

Then Charles gathers his courage and swallows his pride, and puts his fingers to his temple for the psychological boost. _You there, Az?_ he asks. Normally it'd be _love_ , or _dear_ , or _sweetheart_ , by now. But he's not sure he still has that right.

The wordless welcome he gets is something humbling. And also painful, a little bit, and has his face crumpling up as he fights tears. _What has he talked you into, baby_ , Az asks. There's no anger, in the mental signature. Maybe a little chiding, at most.

_Oh. That's a nice way to put it,_ he responds. _Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. I don't deserve it._

_Never mind that. You want me to come pick you up?_ Thus Az spares him even having to ask, to ask if he'll be taken back, and he thinks he'll love Az forever, forever –

XXX

The thing about teleportation, it's too damn quick. Physically, maybe, the body can acclimatize, to the sudden switch in environments, the abrupt arrival at one's desired destination. But when the contrast is great, it's much much harder for the psyche to adjust. Three, four hours back, Charles said goodbye to this apartment, wandered from room to room with Erik exiled out to the top of the stairs. Cried a little bit, by the end, felt all through his bones, every cell and nerve what a mistake he was probably making, and still somehow couldn't stop himself.

There's a gut-sucking anti-climax, a salutary bathos in being back so abruptly, and without ceremony or bugle-trumpeting. Az smooths him down, steadies him on his feet as Charles wobbles a bit, standing suddenly in their own living-room with his outside shoes on the new carpet they chose together, and the coffee-mug from this morning that he'd missed, clearing up and washing the dishes one last time, that wasn't the last time after all. He can feel how the hands are a proprietary reminder of who's in possession, not just a reassurance and a steadying influence. The hands, and the tail, too: flicking at his ass with the closest Az has come in the last ten minutes, to reproof.

And along with every mundane detail, it's overwhelmingly welcome and dear and familiar, he could cry all over again with relief. “Little runaway,” Az says, the chastisement light enough. “For eleven o'clock in the morning, you look deadbeat. Probably all the mental strain of being a dirty catabout and town bike, eh? You're not suited to infidelity, sweetheart: you haven't the asshole mentality to take pleasure in it.”

It seems to be true, so what can be said about that? “Go have a lie down, recover a bit, baby,” As says, nudging him gently with one shoulder. “I'm going to pop back and give your bit on the side a hand.”

Charles flushes up at that, shamed and concerned. But he can't address it directly, since Az hasn't: his light touch amounts to acting like it's barely happened at all, only the most glancing references. “And by 'a hand',” he says carefully, “you mean...?”

Az laughs, and a sharp red point – his tail – prods him in the belly. “Exactly what I say. I'm not going in with all guns blazing. Though we may have words if he proves pugnacious. Your taste, my love,” he says, shaking his head. “Your _taste_. But I'm not petty enough to wish a man a twenty-mile walk on a hot morning: I've had a look at the map for the nearest garage. I'll go help him out and speed him on his way: good riddance. And then home to you.”

And he kisses Charles' cheek, and then he's gone, for why? To help out Erik, who has been stealing what's his for the last three days, as he must know very well. No cloudy-eyed romantic, Az, not really. Still Charles' hero, though. And he rubs his eyes, and thinks that Az was so right. He needs a kip, after a cuppa, and he gets right on that.

In the kitchen he takes a look around as the kettle boils, and half expects to see the note he left in the early hours this same morning still there. But of course it makes sense that it isn't. If Az's immediate initial reaction was to rip it up and throw it in the trash can, that would be perfectly reasonable. That Charles still, in fact, isn't privy to what, exactly, Az's first reaction to the news of being cuckolded and betrayed was, is... well. Par for the course.

Even with Charles Az doesn't confide much that hasn't been processed, examined and thought through carefully. His spontaneous, unpremeditated reactions are his alone. And if he chooses to keep it that way, that is undoubtedly his call.

So, it's binned, then, and Charles operates on that assumption, thanks God for it, and moves on to opening cupboards and debating the merits of four different types of teabags, and two boxes of the loose stuff. It's as he waits for the kettle that he moves over to the mirror in the kitchen, to see what three days of dissipation and hound-doggery have done to him, if his features have begun to rot like Dorian Grey's. It's then, that he sees it.

Az has framed the note – just a cheap hardware store frame that they must have had lying around, and the note doesn't fill the frame, leaves empty backboard to the top and the bottom. There's plenty of room in the space left for the legend he hammered out in a luminous marker he found in the kitchen drawer, under pressure of time and guilt and regret, very little time ago really, a century or two it seems.

'I HAVE SUCCUMBED TO ERIK'S FATAL LACK OF CHARM WHICH MAKES ME TOO STUPID FOR YOU, LOVE, AFTER ALL. I WISH I WAS SMART ENOUGH TO STAY. XXX LOVE CHARLES.'

So that's how it reads, and Az has chosen to capture and immortalise it for eternity. The frame itself Charles takes as a warning, that Az doesn't want it thrown away or forgotten.

That, Charles regrets, because he'd sooner pretend this morning never happened, himself. But he accepts that it's not up to him. Is it a punishment, he wonders. But he doesn't think so. Not Az's style at all. Therefore it has some other purpose.

Perhaps a little warning and boundary-marking to Erik, he thinks, if they ever get to the point of accepting him once more as an occasional visitor to the house. A little bit of advice to him, an eye-opening view into how Charles has really thought of him, even at his most helplessly smitten, unwisely impetuous. Even smitten, Charles views Erik with a scientist's eye, laceratingly sceptical.

Or maybe a reminder of that same thing, to Charles himself.

Either or both could be true, but the ways of Az are often mysterious, and Charles has learnt, over months, exactly how far it will get him to quiz him too persistently. He makes his tea. He goes back to bed, and sleeps.

xxx

When he stirs it's past midday, and he's been woken by a companion climbing onto the bed with him. Charles opens his eyes to Az, propping his head on one hand as he lies close, and looking down at him with a very serious expression.

It's good to be home, and good to have Az home. “You've been a long time,” he yawns. Then he opens one eye at Az, cautiously. “But you're in one piece.” He is, and unscathed also: his usual dapper self, in fact. “Did he give you any trouble?”

“Depends what you call trouble,” Az shrugs, tickling Charles belly up under his rucked-up shirt, absently. With his hand: his tail is out of sight. Which bodes no good, or rather no-good activity, shortly. Charles stretches pleasantly, luxuriously, at the thought. “He cursed me up and down – very colourful language, whatever he did to you with that mouth I'm going to have to dip you in bleach to take it off. Damn cheek, considering. You'd think he was the one hard done by. Refused to accept you'd gone of your own volition, until I pointed out you could perfectly well let him know, if not. And then very kindly condescended to accept my help, once he realised that was what I'd come for.”

Charles sighs. That sounds like a note-perfect account of Erik, all right. “You were still gone a long time...?”

Az laughs. “Ye gods. He refused to accept the assistance of the first garage: checked out their bona fides via umpteen websites, once he could get a signal. Established to his satisfaction that they couldn't do an acceptable job on a 1968 Corvette Roadster. Nor the second. Nor – “

“I get the idea,” Charles interrupts. “But you found somewhere that His Majesty found tolerable in the end?”

Az shrugs, at that. “Near enough. The princess found that the pea was acceptably miniscule – at the fourth establishment – once I pointed out that I was doing him a favour, he was being extremely tiresome, and that I might just be tempted to dump his complaining ass in the creek, if he didn't deign to whip out his plastic and let a perfectly competent mechanic change his fucking oil and tinker with a non-dealer-approved part for his beloved. What a kvetching old biddy he is, my love. I entirely fail to understand his enduring appeal.”

“I'm sure he was grateful really,” Charles says seriously, loyally. Erik probably will be grateful. Later. Might call with a thank-you, to transmit at second-hand.

“Yes, I'm sure,” Az says sceptically. “It didn't stop him snarling something about how he should have taken more advantage of having you tied up and helpless when he had the chance, to leave his mark more thoroughly so that you wouldn't forget that he'd been visiting. I don't think he takes well to being one down in any given situation.”

Charles has his face screwed up, pained. “No. Shame that he never does look on the bright side. At least the _car_ hasn't run out on him. That would be an unacceptable loss.” He scoots a look sideways, to see if his diversion has them diverted. But Az is looking down at him both tender and amused, and he knows that the issue at hand is still the issue at hand.

“So, you let him do that?” Az asks, conversational, not heated in the least. “I shouldn't be surprised: you are such a fan of restraint and control, you little pervert.”

Charles can't very well not flush up: but it's not painfully awkward, since Az doesn't allow it to be. “I feel like I ought to be apologising here,” he begins, eyes evasive, travelling everywhere but Az's face. He would have already, if Az had been willing to listen.

“Oh shut up,” Az says, quite conversational. “As if I didn't know this was coming some time or another. I guess you had fun: and second thoughts, what, less than half a day in? He has to be more of a pain in the ass than even I'd reckoned. I think _I_ could have put up with him longer than that. Better than perpetually wondering, isn't it? Now you know what you've been missing: and here you are. Nothing he can give you that I can't, isn't that right? But,” he adds, murmuring it into Charles' collarbone, nosing at the collar of his shirt, hands on his hips, his ass, "plenty that he _can't_.”

Az's tail feels like a whip when he lashes it out at a certain speed and angle: agile and fierce enough to still take Charles by surprise. And that's him, rolled over from his back onto his belly, hands caught and captured with a speed that has him blinking and gasping and wondering at how Az can always, but always, take him by surprise that way. Still, even now.

His hands are caught, flexibly bound in chains that are muscle and tendon and tight leathery hide, in a way that his hindbrain has now firmly associated with imminent possession to the extent that he's hard almost immediately. As if Az doesn't know that, now, too.

“Can he do that?” Az asks, soft as a song and inflexible, stern as any schoolmaster. He already knows the answer, and Charles doesn't offer any: is too breathless and too exultant. “Do you want me to undress you by hand, and keep you bound? Or bind you up, and undress you this way?” There's a sharp, itching tickle under the hem of his shirt, digging down into the waistband of his khakis, hard enough to scratch and score at his ass, to remind him that Az's special equipment is strong and flexible enough to hold him down while he makes up his mind.

“Any way you like,” Charles answers, face pushing into the bedclothes, heart hammering.

It merits a stilling, because Charles is frankly usually pretty pushy and demanding from the bottom, more than specific about exactly how he wants to be put through his paces. Az settles down over him, legs pushed apart, but his hands are still bound and his heart is still hammering. “Do you think you've done wrong? Do you think it merits punishment?” And this is gentle.

Charles is smiling: even with his face half-obscured with nice fancy Martha Stewart linens, it's clear. “I submit to your judgement on the matter,” he says. Fuck, provocative little bastard, both of them know it too.

“Do you? _Do_ you,” Az says, terribly calm. Charles' hands are loosed, suddenly: and something sharp as a knife caresses Charles' cheek, so light it could be a kiss: the point of Az's tail, that can be a blade or as gentle as a lover's hand, perfectly trusted. “Are you sorry you came home? Is this still home, you and me?”

“No. And always,” Charles replies. Who needs more than that, anyhow, no-one.


End file.
